Banking

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) will almost certainly announce new stimulus measures at its policy meeting next week, analysts said, as eurozone inflation turned negative and the economic outlook continues to cloud over. After disappointing financial markets with what were widely to perceived as half-hearted measures in December, ECB chief Mario Draghi will announce bolder policy moves this time ...

Yangon / AFP Four more foreign banks have been given preliminary approval to operate in Myanmar, state media reported on Sunday, the latest government attempt to attract overseas investment to the emergent nation. Myanmar’s banking system was closed for decades to outside competition under junta rule, leaving the country laden with a creaking financial infrastructure and a populace deeply suspicious ...

Bloomberg Negative interest-rate policies currently in use by central banks around the world have worked through their respective systems in much the same way as positive rates, though it’s not known how far below zero that would continue to be the case, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said. In its quarterly report published on Sunday, the Basel-based “central bank ...

BLOOMBERG Banks that finance their operations abroad with wholesale, cross-border or cross-currency funding are amplifying credit crunches, while those relying on local deposits remain a more stable provider of loans, economists at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said. Those banks whose foreign subsidiaries lent money raised from local savers and companies shrank their balance sheets less than those relying ...

Bloomberg Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. would face new limits on credit exposure to other large financial firms under a Federal Reserve plan aimed at ensuring banks won’t take others with them if they fail. The proposal, which would limit such exposures to 15 percent of a lender’s Tier ...

Bloomberg Banks’ options for gauging the risk of incurring losses from events such as fraud, cybercrime and litigation are set to shrink as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision tries to stop firms gaming the rules. The global regulator, whose members include the US Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China, proposed scrapping an ‘unduly complex’ internal model-based method ...

Bloomberg The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is seeking to force UBS Group AG to turn over records on an account in Singapore held by a US citizen, potentially opening a new front against offshore tax evasion beyond Switzerland. The IRS last month asked a federal judge in Miami to force UBS, the largest Swiss bank, to produce documents on Ching-Ye ...

BLOOMBERG Bank of America Corp. (BofA) has generated less revenue from its equity and fixed-income trading businesses so far this year than in the same period of 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The second-largest US lender’s revenue from fixed-income trading, which includes credit, currencies and commodities, dropped about 10 percent from a year earlier, the people ...

Bloomberg Barclays Africa Group’s Kenyan unit reported full-year profit that was little changed as bad loans increased on rising credit costs. Net income was 8.4 billion shillings ($83 million) in the 12 months through December, compared with 8.39 billion shillings a year earlier, Barclays Bank of Kenya Ltd. Chief Financial Officer Yusuf Omari told reporters Friday in the capital, Nairobi. ...

RIGA / Bloomberg A Latvian lender linked to a string of money-laundering probes was closed by the European Central Bank (ECB). Trasta Komercbanka AS, the Baltic nation’s 13th-biggest lender by assets, had its license revoked after local regulators slapped restrictions on it in January. Latvia’s Financial and Capital Market Commission, which doesn’t deem the bank systemically important, said the move ...